Month: August 2009

Vaccines have been sold as essential for our survival. And we’re vaccinating a significantly larger number of kids because of it. Many hospital boards and health care systems even link incentive pay for executives and directors to their pediatric immunization rates.

But there’s more than a conflict of interest going on here. Vaccinations, it appears, are downright dangerous.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Re-thinking Vaccines.

Well, get ready to have your eyes opened. Dr. Roberto Giraldo has brought something very interesting to Brazil since moving here from New York City. Giraldo is a Colombian medical doctor with a speciality in infectious diseases and immunology. He’s worked a lot with AIDS patients all over the world and has much to say about the inverted medical system he’s worked in for over 40 years. And he’s been talking lately with Dr. Norberto Keppe. Keppe is the scientist behind Analytical Trilogy, which is the science I base these programs on. And they’ve been talking incessantly about the bad science Louis Pasteur brought to the world, and the forgotten genius of Pasteur’s contemporary, Antoine Béchamp. We’ll explore that a little more in our program today.

If you start investigating the vaccine business, you’re in for quite an eye opener. First of all, be very clear about this: vaccinations are a business. Forget all the drug industry hype about protecting our children, this is a profit-based endeavor through and through. A couple of years ago, independent market analyst, Datamonitor, commissioned a report from a vaccine analyst – and who know there even was such a thing. Hedweg Kresse was her name, and in this report she discussed the future outlook for vaccine profits. Turns out she’s predicting that the introduction of high priced vaccines will induce some rapid growth in the pediatric and adolescent vaccines market. She’s predicting that that market’s goint to quadruple by 2016 across the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and Japan.

They’re projecting it. That means they’re going to make it happen.

The crucial factor, what’ll make these stupendous profits possible, is the “introduction of a product into national vaccination schedules.” This means they’re preparing product, and marketing it through highly paid lobbyists to government officials in these countries.

And then slipped in ominously right after this comment is consultant Kresses’ admission that this product introduction into national vaccination schedules virtually guarantees market expansion and high coverage rates in the target population.

“Coverage rates.” My God, the language. That means the numbers of people who are vaccinated. You can just imagine the directors of the vaccine companies hashing it out with flow charts and projection sheets. Talking about windows of opportunity and profit margins and return on investment. Kind of chills the blood, doesn’t it?

But you know what else guarantees that these new high priced vaccines are adopted by various national vaccination schedules? Reimbursements. That’s corporate speak for payments to directors of hospital boards and health care systems based on the immunization rates they achieve in their institutions. So they’re paid bonuses if they increase immunizations.

Now I know this is a shock. Anything that cuts directly against the prevailing point of view always raises the hackles of some. But vaccinations, like Pasteur’s Germ Theory itself, is something that’s been marketed – peddled actually – by some who stand to make a ton of money by promoting and supporting it. And that alone should make us take a second look.

It’s a philosophy deeply entrenched in our North American view of life: make your money work for you, leverage your investments, make money while you sleep.

But hidden behind these strategies is a massive trap. Money, which is supposed to be a means, has become the ends. Today, capital is more important than your mother.

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Redefining the Relationship Between Work and Capital.

One of my students, a Director at a large European supermarket chain, was lamenting the plight of human beings after returning from his summer vacation in Europe. “People seem lost,” he said. “They seem very far from the basics of life.”

Then he went on to make an interesting parallel. When he was a boy growing up on the French island of Martinique, he became fascinated with bee-keeping. He learned the basics from his dad, then began to branch out to develop his own bee hives. Marked by a strongly competitive nature and beset with the rivalry that commonly springs up between sons and fathers, he set out to see if he could overtake his father’s honey production. He studied and researched the latest bee breeding techniques to learn how to maximize production, do more with less, ramp up his production to steroid-high levels without increasing his investment substantially. He imported queen bees from France and America, bred them with his local product, and very shortly achieved impressive spikes in production levels.

He admits to feeling a certain power in this, a sensation that he was creating some kind of super bee that would lead the way to continuously higher quantities of honey. But his success was short-lived. Hybrid bees, it turns out, are much more fragile than natural ones. They bred quickly and produced a big jump in honey output over the short term, but were genetically weaker and more sensitive to fluctuations in environmental cycles. What’s more, their breeding cycles were totally out of sync with nature’s. Bees would breed robustly, then fly out of the hive looking for flowers to pollinate, and the flowers wouldn’t be out yet. Over the long term, my student realized, mucking around with nature had disastrous – and expensive – side effects.

In our discussion, we were making the connections between the philosophy underlying his desires to out-produce his father, and the mania in business today to produce ever increasing profits based on projections and stockholder demands rather than natural business cycles.

“If I’m to have any possibility of meeting those imposed financial goals,” he told me, “Something’s going to have to give. I’m going to have to take shortcuts somewhere – with employee relations or salary limits or even business ethics.”

So look at that dilemma. We’re all twisted up inside because of exactly this struggle. Our megalomania causes us to impose our will on natural cycles so much, bending and twisting and changing everything to fit with our “getting more for less” philosophy, that we completely screw up the greater system. And then, oh, do we suffer! Because it’s hard, sometimes impossible, to find our way back.

Wasn’t that lament exactly what Dante was articulating when he wrote, “Half-way upon the journey of our lives, I roused to find myself within a dark wood, for the straight way had been lost.”

Today, we’ll focus in on how much we’ve strayed off the path and gotten all twisted around in economics. My colleague and fellow teacher, Sofie Bergqvist, joins me today to provide some illumination provided through Keppe’s book, Work and Capital.